Chinese Scientists Release AI Model For Lunar Exploration

The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geochemistry and the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group have debuted a professional multimodal LLM for the lunar science domain. The LLM is expected to significantly expedite the processing speed of massive amounts of lunar data.

The Institute of Geochemistry has built a comprehensive “digital moon” platform that contains the world’s most complete bank of data related to the exploration of the moon.

The LLM has further created a “smart brain” for this digital moon. Ku Wei, vice president of the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, stated that the LLM identifies lunar craters and remembers them by size, depth, and shape to provide scientists with important bases for their study of the moon’s geological evolution.

According to Liu Jianzhong, a researcher at the Institute of Geochemistry, with more than 1 million lunar craters of a diameter of over 1 kilometer and countless smaller ones, it would be impossible to identify all craters if one relies on manpower alone.

With this LLM, researchers can input an image of a lunar crater, and the LLM will determine its shape, size, and age.

"The accuracy rate is more than 80 percent, exceeding our expectations," Liu said.

As scientific research fuelled by big data changes the human science and technology development process, scientists believe that the intelligence of the digital moon will accelerate China's lunar and planetary scientific research and innovation.

"The LLM is like a child with a very high IQ. We train and teach the child professional things. I personally believe that this child's intelligence may have reached the university sophomore level. We will let it continue to grow and help us solve more scientific problems," Liu said, as per the Xinhua report.